He may have written it nearly a year ago, but it still makes good sense. His opening question – are publishers using outdated metrics – could equally apply to PR.

And it was this that struck me about Tom’s post.

The implicit assumption in Tom’s analysis is that all traffic is good. And more traffic is better. However, even publisher’s don’t think this. Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t think so. Specifically, traffic from search engines. In which case, why is traffic generated by PR firms going to be any better? In fact, you could argue that they will generate precisely the kind of traffic that Murdoch and other big publishers protest to hate – namely, sporadic, non-loyal readers.

Given that this is 2010, surely the traffic for traffic sake argument is well and truly exploded. Isn’t engagement the name of the game?

What is the point of increasing traffic, or indeed unique visitor numbers as per Gawker, if the bounce rate rises and average engagement time falls?

As per Ashley Friedlein’s post, last year, the Newspaper Marketing Agency in the UK found that 56% of newspaper site visits last for under one minute. That’s not a great deal of engagement with content. If increasing traffic leads to greater numbers of unengaged readers, then who cares. I’ve long argued that only publisher’s have access to the data that advertisers (and PR firms) should really care about eg readership figures for specific stories, engagement time with specific pieces of coverage, etc. However, as Friedlein points out, advertising and PR clients are now in a quite powerful position – they know not only the input they’ve paid for (ads or press coverage generated), but they know the outcomes that these inputs have created (or not). They can now easily compare different input mechanisms and see which ones perform better than others. In the context of PR, those that are focussing on delivering outcome based campaigns are clearly going to fare better than those that deliver inputs.

In short, engagement is the name of the game.

But lack of engagement exists everywhere. The New York Times has nearly 2.3 million Twitter followers – and yet the click throughs on links to its stories via Twitter often barely break into double figures. Even the best ones are in the low 000s. Massive reach in this case isn’t necessarily translating into engagement with content (at least not on the scale that you might imagine)

To return to Tom Foremski’s argument, I’d be curious to know how a PR might go about bumping up traffic to a particular news story (I have an image of hapless PR execs spending their days furiously opening and re-opening the web page of a piece of coverage to try and bump up the viewer figures – again, it might increase traffic, but engagement time is clearly zero).

If you were going to take this approach, why not just run a PPC campaign instead? (don’t publishers do this already?) Why do you need a PR firm to do that?

As Friedlein aptly puts it: “Too little attention is given to measuring outcomes. Specifically, digital media and digital publishing offer greater opportunity to track and measure outcomes that are not so readily available in ‘traditional’ media.”

Likewise with PR. The sooner the PR sector starts to think about outcomes and engagement rather than inputs, the better for all concerned.

4 Responses to “Engagement – PR’s lost metric”

I’d be even more specific on the engagement point and say that the two things we’re ultimately looking for are maintained/enhanced reputation and likelihood/certainty to buy.

Digitisation enables numerous ways (yes, that is vague) of assessing the level of engagement. But we should start with what the desired commercial impact is. Invariably, that is for the audience to either ‘think better’ of the brand and/or open the wallet at a specific point in time.

Until someone cracks that mother of a nut, it’s a case of creating a grown-up and pragmatic combination of the various ways in which we can reasonably chart outcomes. There is no one-size-fits-all.

And even if there will one day be a single, certain and clinical way of evaluating PR investment, the one thing we’ll never be able to guarantee is that the audience is telling the truth when it does ‘engage’.

Andrew Bruce Smith

Hi Steve – thanks for the kind words 😉

Engagement isn’t without its own challenges. As A. Kaushik has pointed out, you can work out the degree of engagement online (eg length of visit), but rarely the kind of engagement (is that time being spent enjoying and agreeing with a story – or struggling to understand what it is saying – or are you on a phone call and the page is still open but you aren’t reading it).

Having said that even a rudimentary understanding of Google Analytics will tell you how many people “bounce” on your site (In Kaushik parlance, I came, I saw, I puked). Rather than focussing on page views and unique visitors, we should be looking at engagement metrics such as depth of visit and recency – and working out the relationship to a defined outcome.

I thought this was a brilliant post making loads of really powerful points. The one thing I would add into this is that engagement is obviously really hard to measure. One thing that we are working on is using a piece of technology that enables us to measure traffic driven by earned digital media coverage regardless of whether or not there is a link in the piece. ie more than just referred traffic.

for the first time this means that you can measure the outcomes from digital media coverage not by the amount of traffic on the destination site but on the traffic it generates to a property owned by the brand. If you sell things off the web site then sales if not then you could measure how many people signed up for a seminar as a result of a piece in the NYT. Now that is cool in my mind.

Andrew Bruce Smith

Hi David – I agree that measuring engagement isn’t easy. As per my reply to Steve, even if measuring the degree of engagement online has become easier, being able to truly understand the kind of engagement (and measure its impact) is still a challenge. However, those like you who are investing in ways to achieve a better understanding of overall engagement must surely be better placed than those that don’t.

As a matter of interest, is the technology you refer to an in-house solution or are you using a third party? And if the latter, who is it?

Why the LinkedIn Insight Tag is a huge free bonus for B2B marketing

Andrew Smith August 8, 2018

The LinkedIn Insight Tag - have you installed it on your website?Have you even heard of it?
If not (and you are involved in any way with B2B marketing or PR), you are denying yourself a lot of insight about LinkedIn members who visit your web property. In fact, any organisation that would like to know more about the type and kind of professional person visiting their site can benefit from the Insight Tag.
So what